


A Picture and A Thousand Words

by fhartz91



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, Crush at First Sight, Death of a Character that isn't Kurt or Blaine, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, High School, Kissing, M/M, Mention Of Homophobia, Teen Romance, mention of bullying, mention of minor violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:44:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4696115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhartz91/pseuds/fhartz91
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt has been a photographer most of his life, and now, a high school senior, he’s trying to get into one of the toughest schools for photography and the visual arts in the country - NYA. But when Kurt receives devastating news about his portfolio - the one thing that he needs perfect to not only get into the school of his dreams, but win a scholarship to go there - he goes out in search of inspiration. He finds it in a thrift store, in a journal containing the story and photographs of a man that becomes his muse. Kurt goes out in search of him, and not only finds him, but his grandson, Blaine. The two of them have an instant connection, and knowing that they’ll both be in New York City next year seems like kismet. But what will happen when Kurt finds out this boy might stand in the way of everything he wants?</p><p>I wrote this for the KBL Reverse Bang 2015. Unfortunately, it's posting late. There is some amazing art that came first, of course, and inspired this story, which everyone needs to go see.</p><p>http://lady--divine.tumblr.com/post/127979195421/ladydivine-these-two-pics-keep-getting-dropped<br/>http://lady--divine.tumblr.com/post/127951405096/so-unfortunately-my-kbl-reversebang-fic-is-going</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MyPopCultureSummer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyPopCultureSummer/gifts).



> This story includes tidbits of Devon Anderson’s (Blaine’s grandfather’s) life as a homosexual man growing up from the mid-30s to the present. It details his life as a closeted homosexual, his struggle to find a place in society, and his eventual marriage to his best friend - a woman. These stories don’t actually belong to me, but in an effort to make Devon Anderson’s struggle authentic, I have gone to several friends of mine - older men who grew up during this time period and suffered the same things Devon would have suffered. Their stories (which they gave me permission to glean from) are Devon’s stories, and I owe them my most heartfelt thanks.

“Dry!” Kurt exclaims, offended by this critique of his work to the depths of his soul. He yanks back his portfolio, closes it, and clutches it protectively to his chest. “What do you mean it’s _dry_? Every single one of my photographs is an award winner! An… _award_ … _winner_!” He jabs his finger on the desk top with each word to emphasize his point.

“Yes, they are,” the woman behind the desk says, ignoring Kurt’s hysterics. “And individually, they’re excellent. But…”

“But?” Kurt interrupts, loathing in his eyes for this harpy intent on tearing apart his dream.

Ms. Boarish - McKinley High’s career counselor - a spiteful, prudish, and bourgeois old hag as far as Kurt is concerned, even if she is only in her thirties. Where most McKinley teachers would be annoyed by Kurt’s outburst to the point of giving him whatever he wanted, Ms. Boarish looks at Kurt with an amused smirk on her Rum Raisin lips. He hates that smirk. When he sees it, he feels like she’s not taking him seriously. Could _he_ take himself seriously right now? He _is_ acting like a diva. To her benefit, she’s the only teacher/authority figure in this school who will listen to him rant without automatically putting her fingers to her temples and sighing, but that’s probably because she enjoys his misery too much.

She takes her overly-ornate glasses off her face and places them carefully on her desk. Kurt hates those glasses, too. She’s a teacher, for Christ’s sakes! She couldn’t just buy herself a respectable, stylish pair of eyeglasses? No, hers are bright purple, retro cat frames, with random bling glued all over the place. On anyone else, Kurt might find those glasses cute, even a little daring. On this woman in particular, the one clawing his scholarship project to pieces with her vicious, vicious words, Kurt thinks they’re ridiculous.

“But together like this,” she says, gesturing to the portfolio in his arms, causing him to shift his grasp to further protect it from her evil gaze, “they’re a jumble. There’s nothing cohesive about it, no theme that threads the images together.”

“They _have_ a theme.” Kurt spits the words out of his mouth before he has a chance to fully comprehend them. Not until he hears them out loud does he realize she’s right. He doesn’t have a theme. They’re all excellent photographs, but they weren’t really meant to be together in a collection like this.

Critically speaking, they’re sort of random images, mainly of his friends doing their own thing, wearing clothes he designed and made, or candid shots from choir competitions the Glee Club he’s in has attended – the girls touching up their lipstick in the mirror, the guys laughing and fooling around, their choir director calling them over for some last minute practice, demonstrating the moves they needed to work on right as the clock ticked down. A few photos are of his dad working in his shop, including some industrial close-ups of engines, tools, cars torn down to just their frames, greasy hands artistically portrayed in black and white. He’ll concede there are scant examples of his hand-tinting and manipulation skills. (He should really add a few more of those. Okay, so, she got him there.) The rest of his portfolio consists of the requisite scenery and landmarks – traditional sunrise and sunset shots, four seasons of the Auglaize River (the ones of it covered in cracked ice before the spring thaw are his favorites), Annie Oakley’s grave (Mercedes swears she can see a woman holding a rifle standing in the background, but Kurt is convinced it’s a photobombing teenaged boy carrying a stick), Allen County Memorial Hall.

“They’re…uh…interpretive,” he says, speaking quicker as the perfect cover story leaps to mind. “They’re meant to illustrate the plight of the modern teen, how we’re expected to act like adults when we’re barely done with childhood.”

“And the landscapes?”

Kurt can tell from the unwavering stare in Ms. Boarish’s piercing cognac eyes that she knows he’s bullshitting her, but at least she looks impressed.

“They set the scene,” he says smugly, pulling himself straight as a show of his superiority. “We live in Lima, Ohio, for crying out loud. The quintessence of rustic quasi-suburbia, a breeding ground for materialistic, white, middle-class, Republican America, and all its flaming ignorance.”

She raises a meticulously groomed eyebrow and gives his explanation some thought.

“Right. Okay,” she relents, but only about an inch, “if that’s what you’re going with, you might be able to get away with that…” Kurt relaxes until he sees her _wait one minute_ finger go up. “ _But_ there’s still something missing.”

Kurt’s feathers ruffle. _Missing_? What could possibly be _missing_ (aside from more manips, but he’s already secretly given her that win)? There’s over two hundred photographs in his portfolio. He’s included mountains, lakes, children, antique cars – that trendy, scenic, hipster crap that he personally hates, but that the judges at seven different major county fairs went gaga over, winning him _Best of Show_ after _Best of Show_. He’s taken a picture of nearly everything in the state of Ohio. If it sat still for longer than thirty seconds, he’s snapped a picture of it. The photographs in his portfolio span the last three years of his high school career. They represent weekends lost working at his dad’s shop when he wanted to be at the mall with his friends so he could earn the money he needed to buy supplies or upgrade his equipment. These pictures are the manifestation of countless hours he labored in his mom’s homemade dark room, with watered-down chemical developer turning his fingertips rough even thru the highest quality latex gloves he could find. They are the wear-and-tear on his precious baby – his Lincoln Navigator – that he’s driven from one end of this God-awful state to the other, sleeping in the backseat and waking up before dawn to capture the perfect sunrise over Cedar Bogs/Goll Woods/Clear Fork Gorge/Mentor Marsh/Buzzardroost Rock, until he never wanted to see another sunrise again.

What in _hell_ could he be missing?”

“And what is that, Ms. Boarish?” he asks, acting unaffected, with the foot of his crossed leg tapping furiously at the front skirt of her imitation honey wood desk.

Ms. Boarish folds her hands under her chin the way teachers do when they feel the next words out of their mouth are going to be life-changing, but at the last moment, she drops them to her desk and closes her eyes. She looks frustrated, struggling between continuing this argument with Kurt, and moving on to another student who might listen to what she has to say with a little less attitude.

“ _You_ ,” she says. “I don’t see any of _you_ in those pictures.”

Kurt’s jaw drops. He’s about to laugh, but Ms. Boarish’s closed eyelids pinch together, and he can’t. Whether he hates it or not, Ms. Boarish thinks she’s looking out for him. That’s more than any of the other teachers in this school have ever done.

He’s not going to laugh, but he’s still going to argue.

“There’s _me_ all over these pictures!” he says. “ _I_ took them, _I_ decided on the subjects, _I_ developed a lot of them by hand. This is _my_ work. _I_ did all of his. How can there not be _me_ in them?”

“Kurt,” she says (and there’s the sigh), “you don’t understand…”

“No, _you_ don’t understand. I have been putting this collection together for over three years, and now you expect me to scrap the whole thing and start over?”

“You have to do something,” she says, her voice rising a hair, but she squashes it before she continues, “because this portfolio is not getting you into NYA, and it’s not winning you the Eames Scholarship. And you _need_ that scholarship, Kurt.”

 _Need_. Not want; she said _need_. She’s right – he needs that scholarship, and the accolades that go along with it. If he’s getting anywhere near NYA, he needs to win. Without it, he can’t even eat lunch on the outside steps.

There. She got his attention. _Dammit!_ He hates that she knew how to get to him.

But even if there is an issue with his photographs, and he’s not admitting that there is, how is he supposed to rectify it?

 _Him_. She wants to see _him_ in his photographs. What about _him_ does she expect to see? The _him_ whose existence kept his mother from fulfilling her dream before she died? The _him_ that gets tossed into a dumpster every day? That gets slammed into lockers? That gets ice cold drinks thrown in his face?

The _him_ that will do just about anything to get out of this stereotypical bigoted town and never take a second glance back?

He must have said that _Dammit!_ out loud because she answers with, “Well, if you didn’t like that, you’re not going to like this. It’s not just the photographs. If you want to make an impression, you might want to consider making a mixed-media presentation – a printed book, a video, a collage, something that not only showcases your work, but shows your connection to the subject matter.”

Kurt falls back into his chair. It’s overdramatic, but it’s not intentional. It’s the effect of gravity dragging his body down when he blacks out for a millisecond.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he says. “So now you’re telling me the pictures aren’t enough? When did that happen? I read the rules. They said pictures are fine, and my pictures…”

“Are exceptional. But that’s because they were being graded solely on composition, subject matter, and relevance, and for any other college, that would be fine. Heck, for Tisch, you could get away with the pictures and that crap you tried to feed me earlier.” Kurt frowns, but she doesn’t drop a pause. “But The New York Academy for Photography and the Visual Arts, they’re the upper echelon, and they want to see something more.”

Kurt’s defiant gaze drops to the floor. He can’t look at her anymore. As his eyes trace the intersecting lines in the travertine-colored carpet, he sees his entire life flash before his eyes, except where it used to be him jet-setting around the world with a camera in one hand and a press pass in the other, it’s him at the ripe old age of thirty, wearing an apron, and serving coffee to teenagers who he’ll bitterly think remind him of himself, back when he had a future, when he had promise.

“Look, we all know you can take pretty pictures,” Ms. Boarish says, not giving him a second’s rest from this torture. “But so can thousands of other kids in this country. And not just those kids, but what about the ones coming from other continents? Kids who live in warzones, who manage to snap pictures of bombings in their own towns? Kids who’ve traveled the world? Kids in remote areas, who live off the land, whose cameras are the only way they’re going to lift themselves and their communities from poverty? Pretty pictures aren’t going to win you a spot in the highly competitive and renowned program you’ve chosen, Kurt.”

“Well, when you put it that way, why should I even bother?” Kurt grumbles, plopping his portfolio in his lap and angrily flipping through the acid-free protective pages. He scowls at the photos encased in each, which he can see now are probably more suited for sale to the hospitality industry than for exhibition in a gallery. He stops on his photograph of the Dysart Woods. He always thought this was one of his best photographs composition-wise: the trees peeking through the early morning fog, leaves freshly dressed in fall colors popping out from the misty gloom, the subtle reflection in the river that winds underneath, a slightly blurred silhouette of a hazy reality. But with this new information settling in the cracks of his skull, he’ll probably upload it to a stock website, where it can be bought anonymously and used royalty-free, enlarged beyond its pixel size, slapped into a cheap wood frame, and hung above the bed of some no-name, mid-rate hotel. Maybe he can use the money he makes to pay for a semester at Northwestern – provided he can swing an acceptance at this late date.

He can bunk with Puck. It’ll be fun.

_Oh God…_

Ms. Boarish reaches out a hand to gently touch his.

“Because Kurt Hummel has the ability to blow the competition away,” she says. “You just need to _show_ them.”

Kurt flips the portfolio shut, looking at the photographs he worked so hard on for possibly the last time. What a waste. All that time, all that work, worthless. When he raises his eyes, he’s on the brink of tears. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it. Only one other thing in his life has hurt worse than this.

“I have less than a month till the deadline!” Kurt says. “What do you expect me to do?”

Ms. Boarish gives Kurt’s hand a little squeeze, meant to be comforting.

“I expect you to take this month and put together something new, something fresh, something entirely _you_. And I expect you to get your scholarship.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

“You should have seen her,” Kurt moans, handing Rachel, his best friend in the mutant hellhole they called McKinley High School, her Frappuccino, only slightly judging, as he sits in the chair across from her with his coffee and banana nut muffin. “She was looking at me through those cheap, plastic glasses, mocking me, not at all bothered by the fact that she’s completely ruining my life. In fact, I think she was enjoying it!”

They’ve chosen to sit at a table in the dead center of The Lima Bean, the coffee spot that’s destined to play a huge part in Kurt’s future, but Kurt finds no need to lower his voice or censor himself. This is _their_ space. If other customers don’t want to listen to his drama, they can move their butts outside to the patio.

Rachel, unperturbed by Kurt’s griping, gestures for him to scoot her way.

“Okay,” Rachel says, “I’ve been thinking over your situation, and I may have come up with the perfect solution.” She looks left, then right, then leans forward to share her master plan.

“You think we should get Puck and Finn to pour sugar in her gas tank, too?” Kurt asks, a smile bubbling at the corners of his mouth.

“What? No,” Rachel says, “I’m talking about your scholarship project. I know you don’t want to do the whole thing over, but I think I have a plan that will work for you. Something that’s, shall we say, mutually beneficial?”

Kurt’s eyebrows draw together. “And, how is that?”

“Are you ready?” she asks, shimmying in, excitement brewing in her brown eyes. Kurt nods. He’s sure that whatever plan Rachel Berry has concocted he isn’t going to like, but it’ll take his mind off the burgeoning black hole that is his college prospects. “You and I can get your project done 100% over the upcoming spring break _if_ ” - she drums the tabletop with her hands for added suspense - “you make your project all about _me_.”

For a third time in about two hours, Kurt’s jaw drops. “Come again?”

“Think about it,” Rachel says. She holds her hands up, framing the image she has in her head so Kurt can picture it with her. “You can do a photo essay on my struggle as an unappreciated artist growing up in a small town, making her way to the big city to someday fulfill her dream of starring in the long awaited revival of _Funny Girl_.”

Kurt looks at Rachel, still staring off into space with a wispy smile on her face.

“Are you kidding me?” he asks.

“Come on, Kurt! It’ll be epic.”

“Tell me what this has to do with me again?” Kurt asks. “I mean, Ms. Boarish did say that the problem with my pictures was she didn’t think there was enough of _me_ in them. So how does doing a photo project about _you_ equate to _me_?”

“Because of our complicated relationship,” Rachel lays out, pausing to take a sip of her drink. “Our constant fight for stardom supremacy while maintaining a friendship based on mutual admiration and respect. It’s the classic enemies-to-friends trope. It’s uber-popular these days. People on the Internet eat it up.”

“You read waaaay too much fanfiction,” Kurt mutters, sipping his non-fat mocha.

“And now, you’re an up-and-coming photog sensation,” Rachel plows on, further proving Kurt’s point, “taking pictures of another a-little-further-along-but-still-up-and-coming vocal sensation. Moi.”

Kurt shakes his head. “And what exactly are _you_ getting out of this?”

“You mean besides supporting my bestest best friend in his hour of need by donating my face to his cause?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

“I’m getting the most rewarding thing a would-be Tony Award winner could hope for…free publicity.”

“There it is,” Kurt says, pushing his coffee aside, suddenly losing his taste for it.

“Kurt,” Rachel says with a hint of a beg, “your project is going to be seen by hundreds of people in the arts. It’s going to be all over the Internet. I would be an idiot not to offer.”

“Of course,” he says, nibbling the walnut pieces off the top of his muffin. “Look, Rachel, I appreciate your concern, but I’m not redoing my portfolio. I don’t think that Ms. Boarish really knows what she’s talking about.”

“Uh, Kurt, you do know that her husband is a member of the Council for the Arts of Greater Lima?”

Kurt stops mid-swallow. He actually didn’t know that.

“Irrelevant. That’s her _husband_ ,” he points out. “Not _her_.”

Rachel stares down into the remains of her melted Frap, toying with the next thing she wants to say.

“Kurt,” Rachel starts, tossing her hair over her shoulders and fiddling with the star pendant hanging from a thin gold chain around her neck, “you know I’ve never really liked Ms. Boarish…”

“And that name,” Kurt cuts in, tearing his muffin into banana nut crumbs and leaving them in a pile on his napkin. “That woman needs to change her last name before I can take her seriously.”

“- but she may have a point.”

Kurt hears Rachel’s voice over the sound of his own complaining, and he looks at her aghast.

“Rachel Barbra Berry!” he barks. “You’re supposed to be on _my_ side!”

“I _am_ on your side!” she says. “I’m on your side so much that I want to make sure that no matter what, you make it to New York, go to the school of your choice, and live happily ever after!” Rachel takes a thoughtful sip from her drink. “But mostly I’m on _my_ side! If you don’t get into NYA, then you won’t be living the fabulous life with me, and what in the world will I do without my best gay?” Kurt rolls his eyes. Typical Rachel Berry, to turn this crisis of his into a crisis of hers. “But, I haven’t seen you photograph anything new lately. In fact, I barely see you take your camera out of its bag. Have you…maybe…lost your muse?”

“Absolutely not,” Kurt says, grabbing his cup and chugging what’s left of his cold coffee. Kurt is appalled by Rachel’s insinuation…but only because she noticed. So maybe he was hoping to get by on his laurels, win that scholarship based on past achievements, but that’s because Ohio isn’t his aesthetic. As the end of senior year closes in, he can find no more inspiration among the same old-same old pictures of trees and skies and fields. New York is his obsession, and its plethora of art, culture, theater, architecture...

Besides, Ohio has too much history for him, and he’s eager to leave it far behind.

“No, I haven’t lost my muse,” Kurt counters, putting down his cup. “I’m just…I’m tired of this place. I belong in New York. I always have. It’s where my heart is and I…I can’t wait to go home.”

“I know how you feel,” Rachel says, equally glum. “And we will. We’ll get there. In a few months, we’ll be out of Lima, and our real lives will begin. It’s waiting there, Kurt.”

“Yeah,” Kurt says unconvincingly. Rachel can be as optimistic as she wants. She got her letter from NYADA declaring her a finalist. She’s a shoe in. Everybody knows it; even the people who hate her know it.

Kurt knows because he used to hate her, and he knew it then, too.

“So,” she says, her head bouncing up, her smile back as if it had never left, “do you want to go for some retail therapy? We can pick up Mercedes, stop by Sephora for a makeover, buy a soft pretzel?”

“Thanks,” Kurt says, collecting up his muffin bits in his napkin, preparing to chuck them in the first trash can he sees, “but I think I’ll pass this time.”

“You know what might make you feel better?” Rachel asks, trying again to persuade him. “We can grab dinner at The Red Robin. After the main course, you can pretend to propose to me, and they’ll give us a free slice of Freckled Lemonade Cake.” Rachel claps her hands at another brilliant plan. Kurt flashes her an obligatory half-smile for her effort.

“As much as I love Freckled Lemonade Cake, I think I need some alone time,” Kurt says, “to figure this whole mess out. If I’m going to have a new portfolio – no, a new media presentation – by the deadline, I had better start yesterday.”

“Good,” she says, rising to her feet and grabbing her cup. “It’s good to see you getting down to business. Now go, photograph, create, get that scholarship, and let’s get to New York already!”

Kurt picks up his cup and follows her out, quiet in the wake of Rachel Berry’s attitude that sunshine, optimism, and angels cure everything. But Rachel was right about one thing. Kurt had lost his muse. And even though he’s sure it’s nowhere to be found in Lima, Ohio, he has to at least try if he ever wants to leave. That does require retail therapy, but at a different place than the mall. Besides, he needs to be alone to reflect.

Kurt has to pull a Stella and get his groove back.

Since Kurt was Rachel’s ride to The Lima Bean, he drops her off at the mall to meet up with her boyfriend Finn, then heads off without telling her where. He feels it lends him an air of mystery when his well-meaning friends don’t always know where he runs off to. His afternoon caffeine fixes at The Lima Bean used to be his private ritual before he and Rachel became friends, and she demanded he take her with him. If he let Rachel in on _this_ secret, she’d want to come, and there’d be no getting rid of her after that.

It’s not too far out of their way, but he can’t recall ever seeing another McKinley High student there when he’s gone.

He smiles when he sees the store come into view. It’s almost as comforting to him as going home.

The Et Cetera Thrift Shop.

His mother used to take him there a lifetime ago. Like any second-hand store, it has the requisite out-of-style clothes, broken toys, miscellaneous handmade junk (like picture frames with seashells and glitter glued around the edge, a whole selection of jam jars with crocheted cozies covering the lids), and left over convalescent supplies that most thrift stores carry. But this one thrift store, unlike others he’s been to, has something else that calls him back over and over when he needs inspiration.

Books. But not just any books. All thrift stores have books. This one thrift store has the largest selection of used and antique books Kurt has ever found anywhere in Ohio. It seems to get them daily and by the droves – so many that they don’t all fit on the shelves, and boxes of them are left open in the back room for whoever wants to look through them.

Kurt adores old books. He loves the smell of them, the look of them, the weight of them in his hands, the feel of the paper between his fingers when he turns the pages. The older the book, the better, and this thrift store is rife with the most unique books on the planet – books about art, books about science, books about philosophy, books on absolutely ludicrous subjects like _Animal Husbandry as Defined by Your Astrological Sign_ or _32 Practical Ways to Kill Your Unwanted Pet Goldfish_. Even if he can’t find anything particularly inspirational, a lot of them make him think, and some of them are good for a laugh.

But the real gems to Kurt are the books people normally don’t buy – the used journals, diaries, and sketch books. They usually sit on a shelf by themselves, untouched and dusty, because who would buy something that someone else already wrote in? Usually people’s thoughts aren’t cherished unless they’re bound between glossy covers and sold by publishers like Little, Brown, and Company, or HarperCollins. But some of Kurt’s favorite tales of love, loss, angst, and sacrifice he’s found in single printings by unknown authors.

It’s not only the words Kurt finds fascinating. The whole idea of keeping a journal (something he’s never had the time or inclination to start) tickles him. Kurt likes to imagine what the owner was thinking every time they touched it, pulled it out of hiding from under their pillow, their mattress, or their drawer with the false bottom where they kept it safe from little siblings’ prying eyes. Or how about when they saw it sitting on the shelf at Target or Macy’s or wherever for the very first time? Why did they choose _this_ book, with the brown leather cover? Or this one with the floral print?

Kurt runs his fingertips down the worn spines, lined up in a row and leaning to the right. He touches each one and waits for the perfect diary to speak to him. He has a method to choosing. He closes his eyes and lets the pads of his fingers make the decision for him. His fingertips dance down the line of books once, and then back, detecting smooth, bumpy, creased, and then soft. His fingers stop. Soft is a good sign. It doesn’t just indicate that a journal was opened a lot, but carried, the soft skin a symptom of the oil from a person’s hands seeping into the hide.

He opens his eyes.

His fingers have landed on a diary with a burgundy-dyed leather cover. Kurt was right. He can see from where the gold embossed words on the spine have worn away that this book was handled regularly. It reminds him of a King James Bible, specifically the one his father carried around for a short time right after his mother passed away. It was this same shade of burgundy, with the same style gold lettering on the spine, but it never got this amount of wear. His father stopped carrying it before the year was up, and Kurt’s mother died in September.

Kurt picks up the book. As he grabs it, he feels something inside it shift, and a cascade of pictures fall out of the binding. His heart leaps. Seeing them piled on the floor is almost like Christmas. These memories – someone else’s memories, stories he doesn’t know yet, a puzzle he can create in his head – will be just the thing to get his creative juices percolating.

Kurt crouches down, lays the book by his foot, and starts gathering up the photographs. He picks them up by the edges, flips them over, and blows dust off the printed image. He shuffles them together, smallest to biggest, then sits down on the floor with his back against the wall to look through them. They seem to be headshots, all of the same person – a dapper young man dressed in a suit and bowtie, with the face of a young Montgomery Clift (before his accident). Kurt bites back a smile. He’s really very handsome, with his dark hair styled back away from his face, gleaming from the use of some product (a gel, most likely, something meant to give his hair texture and shine), his eyes shining with the pop of flash bulbs (they leave a distinctive starburst behind – Kurt would recognize it anywhere), and his mouth, well…Kurt might not know much about it, but he has very kissable looking lips. The photos are black and white, but that doesn’t matter. Anyone can print a black and white image. But from the type of paper they’re printed on (Kodak Professional says a red stamp in the back corner) and the grain of the image, Kurt suspects these pictures are pretty old. Late 50s, maybe? Whoever this young man is, he’s not a young man anymore. He might even have gone from this world.

It’s heartbreaking to think about.

On the back of one of the pictures, scrawled in blue pen that – thankfully – doesn’t cause a relief on the image, Kurt reads, “D. B. Anderson – 17 of 52” with a checkmark beside the first number. That means this picture might have been printed in a magazine or a newspaper. So then did the diary belong to the man in the image, the photographer, or a fan? Any one of those would do, but Kurt’s hoping for the man himself. (And though he feels like a traitor to his own kind, his second choice would be the fan – a slightly obsessed fan since there are about fifteen pictures of the man in Kurt’s hand, but as he picks up the diary and opens it, he can feel a bunch more still left in the binding. Not that Kurt’s complaining.)

Kurt pulls open the front cover, searching for any inscription. At the very top, in neat script, he sees written:

_Devon Blaine Anderson_

_(November 1933 - ?)._

_New York, NY_

So there’s a chance he isn’t dead, but he’s really old.

Kurt turns to the first page. He’s long since gotten over his guilt at reading the private thoughts of strangers and dives in.

_November 16, 1933_

_I am born._

_…_

_I’m sorry to say I have no memory of this day._

_…_

_November 17, 1933_

_I am a day old._

_…_

_I have no recollection of this day either._

_…_

_November 18, 1933_

_Why don’t we just go ahead and skip forward about, oh, I don’t know, five years?_

_…_

_April 10, 1938_

_That’s better. A lot that happened around this time (around the age of 4 that is) is kind of difficult to remember, too, except for this day. This bum-dinger of a day. It was a Sunday, around eight o’clock in the morning, and my mother was getting us ready for church. She was busy juggling my brother and sister, and trying to peel my lazy old man off the couch, while trying to break in a new pair of pumps. I felt bad for my mom. She had to buy the shoes a half-size too small because they were on sale, and we didn’t have the money to buy her new shoes otherwise, not with the three of us kids going through our clothes like moths. She put them on first thing in the morning, hoping to have them comfortable by the start of Mass, but after an hour of wearing them, she was limping something awful._

_Anyway, my mom was really busy with everyone else, not to mention the pain in her tootsies, so I was left up to my own devices, which was fine. I was kind of advanced for my age. I could pick out my clothes, tie my shoes, button my shirt…sort of. If you didn’t look too closely, you might not notice that the buttons were off by one. I wanted to help my mother out, so I decided to get myself ready alone. But on this particular Sunday, I decided I wanted to look ‘fancy’. No one looked fancier in church on Sunday than my sister and my mother, with their pretty dresses and their hair done up, their make-up just right, and I decided that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be handsome in my tweed suit. I wanted to be pretty. So I put on one of my sister’s old, old party dresses. I slipped into my parent’s bedroom, sat at my mother’s vanity, and I did my makeup, and I have to say, I think I looked damn smart for a four-year-old._

_But my mother didn’t. She walked into her bedroom and saw me there, posing in front of the mirror in my sister’s dress that fit me loose around the shoulders, my green eye shadow and bright red lipstick which went all sorts of outside the lines, but proud. Proud of me, proud of who I was, and how I looked. She stopped short – her feet suddenly glued down even though the rest of her body wanted to continue forward. I always took that as a good sign, that she would have rushed in and hugged me if her damn rotten shoes would have let her. But then she threw her hands over her mouth and she started to cry. Not cry like “my feet really hurt and my sweet little boy was nice enough to get himself ready for church and I’m so happy” cry._

_But cry like “someone I loved more than anything has died” cry._

_She cried so hard that my do-nothing father actually got up off the couch to come calm her down._

_My brother laughed like a brainless jackass when he saw me, but my sister was a real peach. She told me I looked pretty. She asked me, “Did you do your makeup all on your own? What a wonderful job you did!” She kissed my forehead and gave me her serving of sausage off her plate. When my father called for the smelling salts and we knew my mom was not about to calm down while I looked ‘fancy’, my sister helped me wash my face. She hung her old party dress in the back of my closet where no one would see. Then she found my pale pink dress shirt that matched her satin sash so we could go to church together and be twins._

_At the age of four, I didn’t understand much, but I knew a lot._

_I knew that I wasn’t like my brother, and I probably never would be._

_I knew that my sister, Gloria, would always be my best friend._

_And I knew that my mother would never love me the same way again._

Kurt moves his fingers to the top corner of the next page and finds his hands are shaking. He knows he should probably close the journal, buy it, and read it at home, but he can’t stop. He keeps a photo of Devon – one of him dressed in a checkered suit and tie - poised above the diary as he reads so he can look into the face of this man, this brave man, who grew up an outcast, disowned by his parents until later in his life when he became a famous actor and singer, who lost his favorite sister young, who was constantly tormented by his alcoholic brother. Who spent a lifetime looking for love, looking for acceptance, looking for freedom, and found hate, hate, hate instead. A man who was bullied, and in the end…well, Kurt doesn’t know. The story cuts off somewhere around 1967, just as Devon starts talking about running away with the man of his dreams.

It seems more to that story was included, but the pages have been torn out. The last page of the journal has only one line written on it, and it says, _“I can tell you that in all my oddest dreams, I never expected that to happen.”_

“What?” Kurt blurts out, turning the page over several times, hoping new words would appear. “What happened?”

“Uh…it’s…closing time,” a timid voice says. Kurt looks up, eyes red, nose running, to see a boy about his age looking down at him with nervous eyes and a tired expression. The store is quiet and empty and dim. From between the boy’s legs, Kurt can see an older woman, smiling kindly, pointing to her wrist, telling Kurt it’s time for him to go.

“Oh,” Kurt says, stuffing the pictures back into the book, double checking the floor several times to make sure he has them all, then standing up. He may not have noticed that he was sitting on the floor in that cramped spot for two hours, but his knees sure did, snapping and creaking as he stands to his full height. “Is it too late for me to buy this?” he inquires of the older woman. “I really need to have this book.”

“You can go ahead and take it, dear,” she says, unlocking the door to let them out. “I’ve already closed out the register. Besides, nobody buys those old journals, anyway.”

“Oh,” Kurt says, pleasantly surprised, “uh…thanks.” He takes a few bucks out of his pocket and slips them into a can on the counter, with a sign wrapped around it, asking for donations to support leukemia research. Then he takes a business card as a receipt. He needs to pay some amount for the book, in some way or another. He needs to claim ownership of it. The story he’s been reading, written in crisp, flowing script on these pages only slightly yellowed after so many years – parts of it could be _his_ story.

 _That’s_ his connection. _That’s_ what he needs to photograph.

Kurt has to find this man.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just as a note, in this AU, Burt Hummel did not become a Congressman, and has not married Carole.

Kurt startles awake when his phone, which he’d stuffed underneath his pillow, starts buzzing in his right ear. His eyes pop open, his mind hypersensitive to the telltale sound. His body seizes for a second, then he shoots up in bed. He fumbles the phone into the air, grabbing it before it can slip from his fingers and tumble to the ground. He looks at the screen and there it is - a message alert, maybe the one he’s been waiting for, but he’s too excited to open it. So he stares, locked in a comical standoff with his phone before the day has even had a chance to begin.

Kurt slept uneasily, tossing and turning when he was usually a calm sleeper, anticipation keeping him on the beveled edge as he waited for any word from Devon Anderson. Kurt read his journal from beginning to end two more times, and displayed his pictures on his desk, his dresser, his laptop, and his bedside table. Kurt reasoned that if Devon was going to be his muse, he had to let the essence of him sink into his brain. It had nothing to do with his bedroom eyes, his flirty half-smile, or the fact that he looked like a real life Prince Charming.

 _“Kurt! This man is old enough to be your grandfather!”_ common sense scolded him, but Kurt couldn’t help himself from shamelessly smiling at one of the photographs and blowing it a kiss.Kurt always did have a weakness for sophisticated older men, especially actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, which was exactly what Devon had been.

After Kurt got home from the thrift store, he went straight to his basement bedroom and started investigating his muse. He found a few random articles that mentioned Devon in three lines or less, and a link to an IMDB page with precious little more than his filmography listed. According to information Kurt pieced together between the articles and the last entries in the diary, Devon Anderson had worked his way up the ranks from background, to chorus, to one-liners, to supporting actor, and finally to screen star, until he fell off the Hollywood radar entirely for reasons unknown. Seeing as he disappeared well before the Internet, he was never really heard from again, and no one went looking for him.

Using Spokeo, PeopleFinder, and any other person locator website he could find, Kurt came up with a total of twenty-three Devon Andersons in the United States, only five of whom had ever had an address in New York, and of those, three with a birth date in 1933. Two of the three had valid email addresses. After an exhaustive search, Kurt discovered that the third Devon Anderson died a year ago.

 _Please_ , he begged to the unfeeling universe. _Please don’t tell me that I’m one year too late._

Kurt sent a message to the other two and hoped that he’d hear something soon, because if he didn’t, he might have to go with Rachel’s plan, and he really didn’t want to resort to that.

The emails he sent read:

_Dear Mr. Devon B. Anderson;_

_My name is Kurt Hummel, and I am a senior at McKinley High School in Lima, OH. I believe that I may have found your journal. I bought it at a thrift store, and I read it cover-to-cover. Your words truly inspire me, as does the story of your life. I don’t want to presume, but I think that maybe you and I have a lot in common. I would like the opportunity to speak to you, in person, if possible. Along with getting the chance to place a face to the incredible things I’ve read, I’m hoping to use part of your story as the basis of a project I’m putting together, but I have no intention of doing anything without your express permission. Please contact me back as soon as possible._

_Thank you in advance for your time._

_Sincerely;_

_Kurt Hummel_

He attached a snapshot of the journal and photographs to add provenance to his message. He also included his phone number to ensure that, no matter what, no matter where he was, he’d get the reply.

He re-read his email once to make sure it was clear, concise, and hit all the points he needed to address. He had considered adding, “Time is of the essence,” but he thought it sounded unnecessarily conceited. When he was happy with the message, he hit send. Then he sat back and waited for a reply.

Figuratively, of course. Regardless of if he didn’t have permission (yet) from his chosen subject to photograph him, Kurt had work to do. He had layouts to plan. He had camera equipment to get in order. He had to make a list of potential back-up plans that had nothing to do with Rachel Berry’s face. In an effort to remain optimistic, he decided to think of his scholarship as a done-deal, no matter what project he settled on. He started putting Post-It notes on his belongings, specifying which ones he intended to take, what he was going to scrap, and what he planned on putting into storage to sell when he became famous.

By midnight, he still didn’t have a reply, so he got ready for bed. He showered and moisturized, taking more time than necessary. He carried his phone around with him from room to room, ready to jump on a message as soon as he got one.

And now, he has one.

He doesn’t even care that it came at a smidgen past five in the morning.

His iPhone beeps a second time, alerting him again to the new message.

Kurt opens it and holds his breath.

It’s from Rachel. One of her pep messages meant to launch him into action.

He knows she means well, but it’s extremely irritating.

_To: Kurt_

_Get up, get up, get up! Time to work! Time to conquer! Time to succeed!_

He gets another alert, heralding another message from Rachel.

_To: Kurt_

_You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it._

“Oh, God,” Kurt groans, rubbing his tired eyes and retreating back under his covers, “she’s started with the Streisand quotes? Now? It’s too early in the…”

A third alert comes on the heels of the second. He’s about to dismiss it when he realizes it’s an email and not a text message.

“Great,” he mutters, flicking the message open, “she’s attacking me from all sides. Probably knows that I…”

He reads the email quickly and stops his grumbling.

This one isn’t from Rachel.

_Dear Mr. Hummel;_

_I was delighted to receive your email, and even more delighted to hear that you found my old journal. I would love to discuss participating in your project. How would ASAP work for you?_

_Sincerely;_

_Devon B. Anderson_

***

Kurt’s Adrienne Vittadini luggage set and his Billingham Hadley camera bags travel a path that starts on his bed, makes its way down to the foyer, and finishes in the trunk of his Navigator. And while he loads his things, getting ready for a full day of driving on next to no sleep, his father watches. Kurt feels his dad’s eyes follow him as he packs up his vehicle, his face showing no emotion, but his eyes disapproving and sad.

Kurt had discussed his potential plans with his father over a rushed lasagna dinner right after he sent out the emails. Friday night dinners in the Hummel household were sacred, a tradition started by Kurt’s mother, and Kurt did his best to honor them…up until recently. Kurt may have taken a raincheck on a few due to Glee Club rehearsals, competitions, study groups, and the occasional school dance. But Kurt knows that his father understands. Burt Hummel realizes that his son is doing what he needs to do to take the next step in his life. He’s probably proud that his son became the take charge type of guy that doesn’t need constant supervision to get stuff done. Kurt has never outright said it like that, and his father hasn’t either, but that’s okay. It’s understood between them, and that’s what’s important.

Kurt explained to his father about his meeting with Ms. Boarish, and how if he didn’t get this opportunity, his entire project would basically be boiled down to how much he loves and supports his best friend, Rachel Barbra Berry, NYADA finalist and Broadway hopeful. His father seemed stoic about it at the time, but he is about most things, and Kurt figured it was no big deal.

When Kurt got the email from Devon earlier that morning, it also included the address of Devon’s estate in Great Neck, his phone number, and driving directions on how to get there. Kurt replied that he would jump in his SUV and be on his way, and that’s basically what he started doing. He was ecstatic that not only would Devon be interested in being the subject of his project, but that he seemed eager to get started right away. Kurt didn’t clear the trip with his dad. He didn’t feel that he had to. He’s eighteen, and if he wants to take a trip to New York over spring break, he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t. He’s been taking trips all over Ohio alone since he got his learner’s permit and his father bought him his Navigator. And all those times, his father didn’t give him the look of blanket disapproval that he had fixed on him now.

Kurt had figured that getting back on track to winning his scholarship was as easy as loading up his stuff and heading out. But when his father caught him packing his suitcases, he called in late for work and stood out in the driveway to watch.

It’s unnerving.

It seems to Kurt that his father has something he wants to say, he just doesn’t know how to say it.

Or he’s waiting for Kurt to ask.

Kurt loves his father, but this steadfast, supportive man has become distant, and Kurt doesn’t think it’s the missed dinners that are bothering him. Burt doesn’t normally hold back when it comes to things like that – things that are important, but could still be considered small in the grand scheme of things. Whatever he’s keeping to himself, like the hands shoved deep inside his pockets, or the thoughts crammed beneath his frayed cap, has built up between the arguments over reheated casseroles eaten a day late. When Kurt entered the senior year home stretch, with graduation looming ahead like a red finish line pulled taut for him to cross, his father started to pull away. When he _is_ around, he’s strangely moody, almost sorrowful.

Kurt wishes for today that he could say his good-byes in a note like he planned and not have to be subjected to this. He’s under enough pressure as it is with his month deadline ticking steadily down. He tries to focus on the things he’s packed and the things he still needs to pack. He’s got his cameras and his lenses. He packed Devon’s journal, along with an old brown leather one of his own for jotting down miscellaneous notes, pertinent information, things he wants to remember, yada-yada-yada. He makes a mental note that he needs to stop by Mack Camera Store and buy three new 64GB CompactFlash cards before he reaches the highway - one for each of his cameras. He’s bringing his laptop. Should he bring his photo printer? It might be a good idea. He’d better grab a ream of photo paper at Mack while he’s at it. Does he have enough clothes? He’s packed three of five suitcases. Shoes? Maybe he could do with another few pairs. He has to prepare for every possibility. Devon lives near the beach. Kurt should pack his swimsuit. Then again, it is only April…

Kurt starts lifting his last suitcase, one full of his sweaters and thicker cold weather clothes in case the weather changes, when a throat clearing stops him in his tracks.

“But, I don’t understand why you have to go away _now_ ,” his father says, a sentence he’s repeated at three different intervals so far.

“Because,” Kurt says with a huff he covers by straining to pick up his bag and maneuvering it into the vehicle, “I have to completely redo my scholarship project if I have any hope of winning.”

“There aren’t things that you can photograph here in Lima?” his father asks.

“No,” Kurt answers simply. He’s explained himself three times already. He’s tired of explaining. He feels drained, which sucks with the drive he has ahead of him. If he leaves now, he’ll be lucky if he hits Great Neck before nightfall.

“Kurt, this is your last spring break before you graduate,” his dad says. “Before you go off to college and New York. Do you really have to spend it in Great Neck?”

Kurt rolls the suitcase into the trunk, his shoulders slumping from exhaustion. He’s not about to change his mind, but why does his dad have to make this harder than it needs to be?

“Dad, I told you…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve explained it to me already. I get it.” His dad takes off his baseball cap, worn from daily wear and faded by the sun. He runs a hand over his head the way he does when he’s stumped for words. He replaces the blue relic, adjusting the brim to block out the sun that’s moved higher since they’ve been standing out in the driveway. “You know, your mom, she found lots of things to photograph right here in Lima.”

“But I’m not like mom,” Kurt says, shifting his weight from his right foot to his left. He wants to go –not to get away from his dad (well, maybe from this conversation) but because the faster he gets to New York, the faster he gets what he needs for his project and _boom!_ \- scholarship. “I can’t be happy here. This isn’t my future, dad. New York is. It always has been.”

“Yeah,” his dad says with a heavy nod. “Yeah, I know, I just…” Burt’s eyes focus on the SUV packed with Kurt’s stuff. He opens his mouth to finish his sentence, but exhales instead, whatever he was about to say blowing away with a long sigh. “Be safe, will ya? You know, pull over if you get tired, don’t use your phone while you’re driving, and…call me? When you get there?”

“Of course,” Kurt says, giving his dad a hug, relieved that he’s finally free to go. “I will. I promise.”

“Good.” Burt claps his son on the shoulder, turns, and walks away. There’s nothing left for him to say, no way that he can make his son stay.

From inside the house, Burt watches Kurt check his bags. He stops, staring at the house with thoughtful eyes. Burt’s heart pauses a beat when he sees Kurt jog back into the house through the open garage, hoping his son might have changed his mind about his trip. Kurt races down the stairs to his room, but comes out again in a flash, carrying two pairs of Doc Martens in his arms and his messenger bag slung over his shoulder. Kurt hurries to his Navigator, sets the shoes on the floor in the back seat, and puts the bag in the front passenger seat. He climbs behind the wheel, turns the key in the ignition, and pulls out of the driveway. Kurt waves once over his shoulder, turning his head only part of the way to make sure his dad returns it.

His dad does, but Kurt doesn’t notice.

***

Kurt has driven to New York a handful of times with his father, and with his friends, their parents tagging along to chaperone. He’s gone for three college tours and a slew of competitions. The first time Kurt saw the iconic lights of the city come into view, he knew that over a decade of pining for New York wasn’t just a phase.

New York is where he was meant to be. That’s his home.

Even if the ten hour drive to get there gives him a pain in his ass, a cramp down his spine, and a crick in his neck.

One of Kurt’s favorite parts about the drive from Lima to New York is watching the scenery change, knowing that he’s leaving Ohio and traveling to somewhere better, a place where he fits in by virtue of being himself, not by kicking and screaming. A back road interspersed with mom-and-pop stores morphs into a main street lined with strip malls, every block capped with a 7-11, stuck on the corner like the period at the end of a sentence, each one at odds regarding the price of gas depending on its association with a fast food franchise or its distance from the highway. A landscape dotted by used car lots and Lutheran Churches narrows into a two-lane highway, followed by hours and hours of farms, meadows, trees and green grass, till the I-80 becomes the New Jersey Turnpike, and he starts seeing civilization the way he defines it. All the musicals on his iPod cycle through before he gets there, and he sings nearly the whole way.

It’s a lonely ride, but it’s immensely freeing.

Kurt stops only once to grab a bite for lunch and to use the bathroom, too excited to be there already to think about meals or breaks. He has a bottle of Evian, a bag of goji berries, and granola in his messenger bag, so he sees no reason to stop for an additional sit down meal. After the despair of Friday afternoon’s career counselor meeting, the excitement of this opportunity fills him with the adrenaline he needs to power through.

Kurt crosses a murky Udalls Mill Pond as the song “A Whole New World” starts to play, and it strikes him as bizarrely apropos. He’s been to Manhattan, parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and a corner of Queens, and when he thinks of New York, those are the areas he pictures – buildings crowded together, busy streets cutting through, with cabs and clutter and commerce as far as the eye can see. But Great Neck is a different universe altogether - a slice of suburban splendor with the promise of urban diversity right at its back door.

No, not exactly. That’s too simple, makes it sound more accessible to the common folk than it is.

Kurt had Googled the address where Devon lives before he headed out, had done close-ups of the neighborhood using the satellite feature, so he was prepared for the large estates on acres of rolling green grass and their magnificent views of the ocean.

He just wasn’t _as_ prepared as he thought he would be.

Who knew that crossing the span of a bridge could make the difference between comfortable and palatial? These people take lavish to the extreme. And high-maintenance – Kurt’s been called that himself, but by people who obviously didn’t know the meaning of the term. Kurt thought the suburbanites of Lima were obsessive about their lawns, but that’s because he’d never been here. On one property he passes, a gardener is on his knees with a ruler and a pair of shears, trimming unruly fescue to a uniform length, while his companion is balanced at the top of what has to be a twenty-foot ladder, pruning the trunk of an African Elephant topiary. Kurt drives by private streets and gated properties, each home more magnificent then the last as he gets closer to the ocean. He bends at the waist to get a glimpse of the Rodin statue in front of one house, leans over the center console to examine the marble columns of another, and finds himself driving with his head craning toward the passenger-side window to get a better view, twice almost drifting off the road.

The houses here are in no way close together, but Devon’s house doesn’t come into view until Kurt turns on to Martin Court and drives onto a property about the size of his entire neighborhood.

No…larger. Definitely larger.

Kurt pulls to a stop at a curb that runs along a lawn the length of a football field, with a cobblestone paved path leading up to the front door. Kurt stares at the house, then checks the address on Google Maps, making absolutely sure he’s in the right place.

30 Martin Court.

Yup, this is it.

“Holy…” He stops himself before the curse makes it past his lips. He’s not a religious person, but he doesn’t want to be sacrilegious in the presence of this cathedral.

Kurt knows he’s not seeing the whole property from the street, but what he does see has him terrified to get out of his SUV. Kurt Hummel has never felt like a country bumpkin before, not even when he stood onstage at the Gershwin Theater (when he and Rachel snuck in after hours to sing – what they affectionately referred to thereafter as a ‘breaking-and-entertaining’). But in the shadow of this enormous house, Kurt feels rather small time.

Nothing like a fourteen million dollar mansion to shear down the old self-esteem.

Fourteen million dollars. Kurt saw that estimate of the estate when he was Googling the address. Here he is struggling to win a $10,000 scholarship. He can’t even conceive of _one_ million dollars, let alone fourteen. The ticket price of this house could put him through college, grad school, fund his study abroad… Heck, with fourteen million dollars, why even bother with school? He could cut out the middle man, buy his own gallery, and spend the rest of his life appealing to his vanity by showcasing only his own work.

No, he’d have to help other artists, too – the underrepresented masses struggling more than he.

He gawks in wonder, the daydream of opening a SoHo gallery tickling his head, until he notices the sun dipping below the seam of his windshield, its golden rays hitting above the level of his eyes. He sighs. He has to suck it up, leave his Navigator, and walk his ass to the front door. If he’s not going to get out of his SUV, why waste the time and the gas to come all the way out here? Driving a Navigator roughly 611 miles isn’t cheap.

“Come on, Kurt,” he says, brushing stray berries off his shirt and taking a peek at himself in the mirror. He has purple shadows under his eyes, and from his sticky tongue, he suspects his breath is probably awful. He can’t do anything about the bags, unfortunately, as his concealer cream is lost somewhere amongst the luggage in the trunk, but his funk mouth he needs to fix. He reaches into his glove box and pulls out a Colgate Wisp. He does a quick brush over his teeth while he gives himself a pep talk. “You can do this,” Kurt mumbles around the tiny device he’s using to scrub his teeth. “Devon Anderson’s just a person. An extremely rich, interesting, heart throb, ex-actor person, yes, but he still puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like you do.”

Kurt tosses the defiled Wisp back in his glove box. He opens his door, swings his legs over the side of his seat, and hops out, knees creaking, hips aching, struck by an untimely urge to use the restroom. But that’s going to have to wait. He can hold it, but if someone could shut off the sound of the waves rushing back and forth, that would help.

Kurt strolls up the pathway to the house, shaking his sleepy right leg every three steps, trying to wrangle the feeling back into it. The sunlight touches his cheek and he peers out toward the horizon. The path to the house makes a left, bringing him to where he can see a sliver of the beach in the distance. The salty sea air blows through his hair, and he takes a deep breath to capture it as it passes by.

Yup, he could definitely get used to this.

The front door looks unusually bland for such an extravagant house – a plain, featureless slab of blonde wood, probably thicker than it appears. The outer walls of the house are entirely made of windows, tinted so passersby can’t see inside, but the occupants can see clearly outside, and a thought that slipped his mind barrels back.

He wonders if someone is watching him walk up.

Thank God he didn’t trip over his tingling foot, but now he might have to explain the leg wiggling.

He doesn’t see a doorbell or a knocker on the smooth wood door, but there’s a speaker box on the wall to his left, the same kind he’s seen on walk-ups in the city. It has several Mother-of-Pearl-esque buttons, each one labeled for a different floor (five total) and one labeled simply _doorbell_ , which he assumes can be heard throughout the whole house. He presses that one. The muted song of bells chiming echoes from floor to floor. He hears them start from above, cascading their way down, and as they fade, they’re replaced by footsteps walking up to the door.

The door opens a crack, and Kurt, excited to the point of nearly exploding, instantly starts talking.

“Hello. My name is Kurt Hummel, and I’m here to see…”

Hazel eyes - _stunning_ hazel eyes - peek around the edge of the door, followed by an eerily familiar head of dark hair, and a friendly smile. Kurt doesn’t know the color of those eyes, but the cheekbones, the hair, the smile…but it can’t be.

Kurt doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he knows he’s looking at the closest thing to an apparition that he’ll ever see in his lifetime.

“Are you…Devon Anderson?” Kurt asks, taking a subconscious step back as the door opens further.

The boy opening the door - dressed in a white-and-grey striped long-sleeve cardigan and grey bowtie, looking like he stepped out of one of Devon’s photographs - smiles brighter, those hazel eyes darting down bashfully. Kurt wants to lean over and catch his gaze again.

He wasn’t done looking.

“Uh…no,” the boy says, “I…”

“Blaine?” a masculine voice calls from inside the house. “Who’s that at the door?”

“It’s Kurt, Grandpa,” Blaine calls over his shoulder. “That boy that you said was coming.”

Kurt’s eyes go wide. Devon told his grandson that he was coming? Kurt can’t help feeling flattered, as premature as that is. Of course, Devon would tell his grandson that he was coming. Devon wouldn’t want him freaked out by the presence of a random teenager wandering around the house, carrying a camera.

“Blaine?” Kurt asks when he hears the name. “As in Devon Blaine?”

“Yeah, I’m Blaine _Devon_ Anderson,” he says, chuckling.

“So, your parents named you after your grandfather?” Kurt crosses his arms over his chest as the breeze off the ocean blows stronger.

“Kind of. It’s a family thing,” Blaine says. “If I have a son, I think they’ll expect me to name him Devon Blaine and start the cycle over again. Not that I wouldn’t already. I absolutely would.”

Kurt nods. “Sounds like a cool tradition.”

“Uh, Blaine? Don’t you think our guest might want to come in out of the cold air?”

“Yes, of course,” Blaine says apologetically, stepping aside. The man walking up behind Blaine is a mirror image of his grandson, except his hair is a shade of grey bordering on silver, and he has more lines on his face, particularly in the corners of his eyes and mouth when he smiles.

But his hazel eyes are equally as stunning.

“I’m Devon Anderson,” he says, holding out a hand to Kurt. “Thank you for coming down here so quickly.”

“Thank you for saying I could come as soon as possible,” Kurt says, taking the man’s hand and shaking it. “I really appreciate you meeting with me.”

“Well, it’s not that often that I find someone so interested in my life,” Devon says, leading Kurt inside, leaving Blaine to shut the door behind them. “I’m no Cary Grant, you know.”

“I’ve always been more of a Rock Hudson guy myself,” Kurt says.

“Mmm, aren’t we all?” Devon remarks.

Kurt follows Devon and takes a seat on one of two identical, camel-colored leather sofas. Those and two matching love seats have been positioned around a gilded iron float glass coffee table in the center of the biggest living room Kurt has ever stepped foot in. This room, with its walls of glass and wood stretching high above their heads, showing the landings of every floor, reminds Kurt of the auditorium at NYADA, which he photographed when he accompanied Rachel and her dads on a tour. With the back wall of windows looking out at the ocean, and the setting sun’s light streaming in, this room would be the perfect place for an intimate concert. Kurt can picture where in this room the orchestra would sit, where the artists would perform. They wouldn’t need to set up chairs for the audience. There’s more than enough seating with the bar adjacent and several other armchairs/stools/high-back chairs scattered around for entertaining. Kurt glances up at the vaulted ceiling and wonders what the acoustics sound like.

Devon sits on the love seat closest to Kurt. He crosses his right ankle over his left, and regards the two boys – Kurt, sitting politely, waiting patiently, taking quick, unassuming glances around, trying not to appear vulgarly impressed, and Blaine, hovering close to Kurt, unsure of whether to sit beside him, across from him, or stay standing. Devon figures it’s a difficult issue for Blaine to negotiate considering he has the biggest shine for this boy that Devon has ever seen.

Devon knows his grandson, God bless him, but even if he they were strangers, Devon knows what a _crush at first sight_ looks like.

“Blaine, why don’t you get this young man something cold to drink? Kurt must be absolutely parched after his long drive out here.”

“What would you like?” Blaine asks. “We have soda, tea, coffee, bottled water, chia - you name it, we probably have it.”

“Thank you,” Kurt says, crossing his legs so his bladder doesn’t burst, “but that’s really not necessary.”

“Kurt,” Devon says, leaning a bit forward and flashing that disarming smile from his photographs, “you may not have noticed, but I’m trying to get rid of my grandson. You see, I have the feeling we’re not going to be able to shake him now that you’re here, and I want to have a moment with you to myself.”

“Grandpa!” Blaine gasps, cheeks flushing red in a blink.

“Oh, okay,” Kurt chuckles, turning his attention to Blaine. “Um, do you have a Diet Coke?”

“Yeah,” Blaine says, pulling himself back from embarrassment at the hands of his grandfather, “I think we have some lying around.” Blaine smiles and nods, but doesn’t move. Kurt bites his lower lip, smiling at Blaine, blissfully unaware of his inaction. Kurt had fantasized briefly when he put Devon’s pictures up around his room what it might have been like to meet him back in the 50s, when Devon would have been roughly Kurt’s age.

If younger Devon was anything like Blaine, Kurt would have been enamored in an instant.

“Bla-ine,” Devon says with a lilt, “would you be so kind as to get our guest his drink? And ask Lillian to set one more place for dinner.”

Blaine looks at his grandfather, his cheeks slightly redder than before, then back at Kurt. “Will do,” he says with a wink. “I’ll just be a minute.”

“Take your time,” Devon says to his grandson’s back, waiting until he’s seen the last of him before focusing on Kurt. “So, tell me more about this project you’re doing.”


	4. Chapter 4

Blaine walks calmly to the stairs, but as soon as he gets there, far enough away from the heart of the living room that neither his grandpa nor Kurt will be able to see, he bolts. He knows his grandfather wants to talk to Kurt alone, and Blaine respects that, but he can’t help his curiosity. His grandfather didn’t divulge the specifics of Kurt’s visit. He told Blaine that Kurt is a photographer and that he’s visiting to photograph him. The last photographer who came by to photograph Devon Anderson was from _Time_ magazine, but that was long before Blaine was born. Blaine has a copy of the issue framed on the wall in his room, his grandfather’s face occupying an inset box on the cover along with the faces of other well-known actors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But why Kurt was there, and for what, Blaine’s grandfather hadn’t explained.

His grandfather also neglected to mention how handsome their guest for spring break was. Blaine can’t help the smile that blooms on his lips when he thinks about him. He’s kind of like…he almost looks like… Nope. Kurt is so uniquely handsome, Blaine can’t think of anyone to compare him to.

Blaine leaps the last three steps, landing in the downstairs hallway, and races into the kitchen. He slides in on his socked feet over the polished tile as he reaches for the refrigerator door handle.

“Hey, hey, hey!” a booming female voice scolds from the island on the opposite side of the room. “No running in my kitchen!”

“Sorry, Lil,” Blaine says, working against a lack of traction to get to the refrigerator, “but _he’s_ here.”

“Ah,” Lillian says, a knowing look on her matronly face as she continues to slice mushrooms. “And what does _he_ need so urgently that you’re racing around like a chicken with no head?”

“A Diet Coke.” Blaine opens the refrigerator door and peruses the shelves. “Diet Coke, Diet Coke…I don’t see any…do we not have any Diet Coke?”

“Try the _other_ fridge,” Lillian suggests, motioning over her shoulder with her utility knife to a second stainless steel fridge that they kept stocked mainly with alcohol, but also drink mixes and soft drinks.

“Oh, duh!” Blaine slides his way across the kitchen to the other fridge and opens the door. He finds what he needs smack dab on the middle shelf. “Yup. Here it is.”

Blaine pulls out a can and shuts the refrigerator door. He takes a step, but stops to consider the can in his hand, ice cold aluminum sticking to his warm skin.

“Do you think he’s going to want a glass?” Blaine asks, putting the can on the counter and going into the cupboard.

“Possibly,” Lillian answers, using her knife to sweep the mushroom slices into a large, steaming pan on the stove.

“And ice,” Blaine says, not really addressing the woman watching him with amusement. “He’s going to want ice to keep his drink cold.”

Lillian watches Blaine fill the glass halfway with ice from the dispenser on the fridge door. He holds the glass up to make sure it’s perfect, then adds a few more slivers.

“Okay,” he says, satisfied with the level of ice in the glass. “Oh, and Lil, we’ll need another place setting for dinner.”

“Already on it,” she says, eyeing Blaine as he heads back out to the hallway with cup in hand…but no can of soda.

“Oh, Blaine?” she calls, arms crossed.

He turns to her from the doorway and raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“Are you forgetting something?”

Blaine looks at his hands and smirks.

“Thanks, Lil,” he says, going back for the can. He has it in his hands, heading out the door, when Lillian calls to him again.

“Blaine?”

“Yes?” He stops with one foot over the threshold, eager to get back upstairs, but too polite to say so. Lillian watches Blaine fidget, one foot in the kitchen, one foot out, and laughs to herself.

“Is he really _that_ cute?”

Blaine stops fidgeting. He smiles slowly and sighs.

“The cutest.”

***

Despite the fact that Blaine hurried to get back to the living room before the end of the discussion, he enters on the scene right as Kurt says, “So, would it be alright if I used you as the subject of my project?”

Devon reaches a hand to Kurt. Kurt leans forward and takes it.

“Kurt,” Devon says, emotion welling in his eyes, “I would be honored.”

“Does that mean he can stay here?” Blaine rushes in, garnering a surprised look from Kurt and an amused one from his grandfather. “I mean, you know, because staying here might help you with your project _(that I know nothing about)_ so you wouldn’t have to travel, and…we have room. Plenty of room.”

“Actually, I was planning on staying at the Holiday Inn,” Kurt says, not wanting to assume an invitation since Blaine was making the offer and not Devon. There was no mention of lodging in the email, so Kurt assumed he’d be staying at a hotel. “The one right off the highway?”

“Oh” – Blaine deflates – “well, I guess, yeah, that Holiday Inn’s nice.” Two sets of eyes turn curiously on him. “N-not that I’ve ever been there, but, I’ve driven by and it looks…nice.”

Devon shakes his head, far too entertained by the back and forth _bad_ flirting by these two boys, but mostly from his own grandson. Devon is surprised. He can’t speak for Kurt, but he had thought Blaine would fare better. After all, Devon and Blaine come from the same gene pool. Devon’s signature brand of savoir-faire couldn’t be found anywhere in his son’s body, Blaine’s father, but Devon always assumed it skipped a generation. Cooper, Blaine’s older brother, seems to have his fair share, but Blaine is different. When it comes to romantic sensibilities, Blaine is a bit more…special. Which is probably why Blaine and his father never see eye-to-eye.

But the Anderson DNA is strong in Blaine.

And regardless, Blaine’s seen all of Devon’s movies. He should have learned something.

“Kurt, we have tons of room,” Devon says. “And Blaine’s right – it’ll save you trouble. Besides, it would be nice to have another soul knocking around in this big house.”

“We have an indoor swimming pool,” Blaine says, trying to sell Kurt on the idea, “a tennis court, an exercise room…a waterfall! And the beach out front is private.”

Kurt’s eyebrows shoot up. He doesn’t want to seem too eager, but Devon’s offer is ideal. Staying at the Holiday Inn for a week would tax Kurt’s budget, mostly because he’s stubborn. As if Great Neck isn’t expensive enough, he chose the closest hotel to the house, which means the closest hotel to the beach, and one with a workout room.

“Well, in that case,” Kurt says, “you might not get me to leave.”

“Good,” Blaine says suavely, even though his cheeks start to color.

“Great,” Devon says. “Now that that’s settled, Blaine can help you settle into a room upstairs. And you boys should get ready for dinner. Our Lillian is an excellent cook, Kurt.”

“She really is,” Blaine agrees with a lot of head nodding.

“Thank you,” Kurt says, “so much.”

“Oh, and here’s your Diet Coke.” Blaine offers Kurt the can and the glass of ice. Kurt takes one look at it, at the ice melting and shifting in the glass, at the droplets of water sliding down the side of the can, and suddenly, sitting still becomes excruciating.

“Uh, can you maybe show me to the restroom first?”

***

“These are really impressive,” Kurt says, looking at an enlargement on Blaine’s bedroom wall – a tinted black and white manip of Blaine’s grandfather as a young man, set against a modern, abstract background. “Did you do the tinting digitally or…”

After Kurt finished in the bathroom, Blaine helped him grab his bags from his Navigator (commenting on how lucky Kurt was to have all that interior and trunk space because Blaine’s Jaguar XKR barely had room for a third of his luggage) and practically dragged Kurt upstairs to his bedroom to show him samples of his work.

With his bags waiting in the hallway, Kurt walks leisurely through Blaine’s bedroom, focusing on the pictures he knows are Blaine’s, hung between old movie posters of Devon’s and pieces by other artists and photographers.

“No, I hand tinted it,” Blaine says, pride slipping into his voice. “It actually took longer than it might seem for a simple dual color tinting, but I had to get the bowtie just right.” Blaine walks over to his dresser, opens the top drawer, and pulls out the same tie from the photograph to show Kurt the complicated aquamarine hue. “See? Getting the right saturation took forever.”

“Well, you did an incredible job,” Kurt says, reaching for the bowtie. Blaine happily hands it over, watching as Kurt brings it close to his eyes to examine the way the fibers aren’t individually one color, but a mixture of blues and greens in subtle, varying shades to produce the illusion of aquamarine the viewer sees from afar. “I have to admit, tinting is my weakness, but you seem to have a knack for it.” Kurt raises his eyes. “I might even be jealous.”

Blaine smiles so wide, Kurt’s surprised that there’s room left on his face for his dimples.

Kurt peeks over at the open drawer and sees a mass of bowties, placed in neat rows and columns, taking up the whole top drawer. A lot of these ties Kurt recognizes from Devon’s photographs; even in black and white, the patterns are unmistakable. Some of the other ties are featured in the pictures of Devon that Blaine has on his walls.

“So, did you swipe your grandpa’s whole wardrobe,” Kurt asks, “or just the bowties?”

Blaine keeps smiling, but he looks stung.

“I know it might seem a little ridiculous, or old-fashioned…”

“No,” Kurt says. “I’m sorry. I’m teasing. To be honest, I kind of have a bowtie fetish myself.” Kurt takes out his iPhone, opens his photo gallery, and hands the phone over to Blaine. Blaine sweeps through the photos, an appreciative expression growing at picture after picture of Kurt, selfies he’s taken almost every morning before school.

“Wow,” Blaine says, “and I thought _I_ was weird.”

Kurt gasps and slaps Blaine playfully on the shoulder.

“No, but this is really cool,” Blaine says. “Man, you’ve got a lot of ‘em.”

“You should talk,” Kurt says. “Remember, your drawer is still open. At least yours are all vintage.”

“So are some of yours. Is that…a clock?”

“Yeah. I found it at my favorite thrift store,” Kurt says, recognizing the coincidence of how that same thrift store led him here, talking about bowties with this interesting boy, whom he seems to have much in common with (if the contents of his bookcase, where he has his music library and his DVD collection displayed, can be believed, as well as the guitar on a stand in the corner), “but Martin Mascherl makes one just like it. You know, if you ever want to pick one up.”

“I just might,” Blaine says honestly. “And… is that even fabric?”

“No, it’s ceramic.” Kurt smiles. He can’t help it. This is the first conversation he’s had in a while that doesn’t make his stomach twist in knots.

Well, it does, but in a good way.

Blaine hands Kurt back his phone.

“I think you might have me beat,” Blaine laughs.

“I’ll wear that mantle with pride,” Kurt says, pocketing his phone.

“You should,” Blaine says, his gaze drifting to his feet, his smile dropping along with his eyes. “But, you’re right, you know. I do have his stuff - his ties, his shirts, his suits from way back when. My grandfather, he…he’s my best friend. He inspires me. It just…it makes me feel more connected to him. Does that sound…I don’t know…childish?”

“Not at all,” Kurt says, his mind wandering to his mother’s vintage scarves that he’s built his entire wardrobe around, her vanity in his bedroom, her Nikon 35mm film camera that he still uses, and her empty perfume bottle, all of which he keeps so that he can feel closer to her. “I can understand that. And hey, you wear them well.”

“Thank you,” Blaine says.

A clock in the hallway chimes, reminding them that they have more to do than talk about bowties.

“Why don’t I take you to your room so you can freshen up?” Blaine offers. “We don’t want to be late for dinner.”

“That would be great,” Kurt says, heading out to the hall to grab his bags. “It was a ten hour drive. I’ll need to wash at least five of those hours off before I feel human again.”

“Let me guess,” Blaine says, cutting ahead to grab the heaviest of the bags, “the Jersey part of the trip?”

“Don’t get me started.” Kurt picks up his camera bags. Nobody carries his babies except him, no matter how sweet and charming they are. “At least I didn’t have to stop in Hackensack.”

***

“So, you’re from Lima,” Devon says, ignoring the dinner in front of him and talking to Kurt. “I’ve been to a lot of small towns in Ohio, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been to Lima. That’s over in Allen County, right? What do you do out there?”

“Nothing much really,” Kurt admits, picking at his Chicken Marsala. Devon was right. Lillian is an absolutely amazing cook. Kurt didn’t get the chance to meet her since their food was already served when Blaine escorted him down to the dining room, freshly showered, and changed into a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt not wrinkled to hell. But Kurt is too excited to eat, so all the pieces he’s cut for himself have only traveled around his plate in a circle, pushing aside the sauce. “I go to McKinley High School.”

“A _public_ high school?” Blaine asks. Kurt nods, taking a sip of his Diet Coke. “Do you like it? Is it a good school?”

“Academically it’s alright, I guess. But otherwise, it’s pretty awful,” Kurt remarks.

“Are you in any clubs? Do you play any sports?” Blaine asks. From his left, at the head of the table, Kurt hears Devon chuckle over the enthusiasm of his grandson.

Is Blaine really _that_ interested, Kurt wonders, or are Devon and Blaine so alone out here in the sticks that Kurt’s life seems exciting by comparison?

If so, Kurt has nothing but pity for these poor guys.

Or was Kurt wrong in his assumption, and Devon _did_ talk him up before he got there? But how? Devon knows nothing about him. Unless he Googled Kurt. Kurt has looked himself up on Google numerous times, and was surprised to see photos of his work, a list of competitions he’s been in, awards he’s won, even an old school picture of him.

He’s still trying to figure out a way to trade it out for a better one. He knows nothing can be removed from the Internet permanently. That doesn’t mean he won’t try.

“Yeah, I’m in a few clubs,” Kurt replies. “And I used to play football.”

“Really?” Blaine and Devon say at the same time. Kurt looks down at his food and giggles.

“Yeah, well, I was placekicker for about one season, if that, but I’m too busy for sports at the moment.” A piece of chicken circles Kurt’s plate as he talks. “Some weekends I work in my dad’s shop. He’s a mechanic, and he…he has his own shop.” Kurt’s voice dips. He’s not ashamed of his father’s job. His dad has his own business, he owns a home. Their family is better off than a lot of people Kurt knows. It just seems strange talking about his father’s auto shop here, in this multi-million dollar mansion. On the other hand, Devon and Blaine both seem like such down-to-earth people to live among such wealth and privilege. A flick of Kurt’s eyes above Devon’s head has Kurt looking at a genuine Matisse (Kurt knows definitively because Blaine was nice enough to introduce it to him). Devon catches Kurt’s eyes and smiles, not just courteously, but with empathy. Yes, Devon would empathize. He didn’t come from wealth, he made it for himself. Kurt feels his confidence returning, and he goes on. “But for a budding photographer, it’s an okay place to grow up. Lots of scenic vistas and whatnot – lakes, rivers, farmland. It’s good practice, but I think I’ve kind of outgrown it.”

“Mmm, I dare say that’s going around,” Devon comments. “Blaine here is also an Ohio native, and he’s chomping at the bit to leave once and for all.”

“Really?” Kurt steals a look at Blaine, who’s been smiling at him through most of their meal. Kurt can’t deny that he’s noticed, but he’s tried not to make it obvious.

“Yup,” Devon answers for him. “Westerville, born and raised.”

“Westerville?” Kurt says. “I’ve gone there a few times.”

“You have?” Blaine asks, lighting up like he discovered that he and Kurt are actually long lost cousins.

“Yes. Inniswood Metro Gardens. I spent a whole weekend photographing there. And I got some great shots of the turkeys at Blendon Woods Park. Oh, and I took some pictures on the campus at a prep school out that way, but I don’t remember the name.” Kurt raises his eyes to the ceiling as he tries to remember. He can see the place clearly in his mind – the ivy-covered buildings, the boys in their blue blazers and grey slacks, and one particular entryway, painted white, with a large dome skylight, and a black scrolled-iron railing running down the length of a winding staircase, a spot Kurt thought would be ideal for wedding photographs - but he can’t seem to dig up the name. “Dearling? Delson? Dalting?”

“Dalton?” Blaine asks hopefully.

“Yeah,” Kurt says. “I think that’s it. You know it?”

“Know it? I’ve been living there the past two-and-a-half years.”

“Wow,” Devon says. “Small world, hmm? And I’m sure you’ve told Kurt about your own interest in photography, Blaine?”

“I started to,” Blaine answers.

“He’s shown me some of his stuff,” Kurt elaborates. “He’s done a lot of great Photoshop work. I’m really envious. I don’t have nearly enough in my repertoire. My career counselor thinks I might need to expand on some of my abilities in that arena.”

“I could help you with that if you’d like…while you’re here,” Blaine offers.

“I’d like that,” Kurt says, looking up at Blaine through his lashes. He might be flirting. He hasn’t decided. He can’t seem to help that, either. Blaine makes it so easy.

“We would love to see your photographs, Kurt,” Devon says. “Did you bring any of your work with you?”

“I did,” Kurt says, “but it’s still packed.”

“Maybe tomorrow, when you’re more settled, you can treat us to a private viewing.”

Kurt nods. “Definitely.”

A lull follows the conversation as the three take a second to tuck into their neglected food, the chicken colder than it was when it was served. But Blaine doesn’t want the conversation to end. He doesn’t want to eat in silence while Kurt’s there with them. Kurt, who lives only hours away from his school, who is interested in photography as much as he is, and who came all the way out there, ten whole hours, to spend spring break with them. Blaine wants to listen to whatever Kurt has to tell them, even if it’s a minute-by-minute replay of everything he did that day.

“What about your mother?” Blaine asks. “You said your father owns a shop, but you didn’t tell us what your mother does.”

“My mother was a photographer, too,” Kurt says, picking up the cloth napkin from his lap and wiping his mouth. “An _amazing_ photographer. She wanted to be a fashion photographer, but there’s not much fashion to photograph where we’re from. But she always had a camera with her, wherever she went, and she took pictures of everything. I always thought I got my talent from her, but my dad says my love of photography had nothing to do with her. I picked up a camera all on my own when I was about 18-months-old, and they couldn’t get it away from me.”

“Really?” Blaine tries to imagine a toddler Kurt, balancing a heavy camera in his chubby arms, waddling and snapping pictures of the couch arm, the end table, and then the floor as he toppled over.

“Yeah,” Kurt laughs, “but I’m not sure I believe him.”

“So, have your mother’s photographs been shown anywhere I might have seen them?” Blaine asks. “Magazines? Or galleries? I would love to see her work.”

Kurt looks down at the red potato he has speared on the tines of his fork.

“Unfortunately, no,” Kurt says, twisting his fork until the potato splits in half. “She passed away when I was eight.”

“Oh,” Blaine says, his fork slipping from his fingers. “Oh, I’m…I’m sorry.”

Devon wipes his mouth. “You’re a handsome young man,” he interjects, quickly changing subjects. “Isn’t he, Blaine? Isn’t Kurt a handsome young man?”

Blaine’s face turns bright red in a second, and he looks down at his plate.

“Uh…uh…” Blaine chuckles nervously, stammering over his tongue, and Kurt laughs.

“You must be beating boys off with a stick,” Devon continues as the flush on Blaine’s face creeps up to cover his ears.

“Not exactly,” Kurt admits. “But I think that’s more the fault of living in Lima, Ohio, than anything to do with me.”

Devon laughs out loud, slapping a hand on the table, making the silverware around the plates jump. “Good for you, Kurt,” he says, sounding impressed. “But wait till you get to New York. Out in the city, you will definitely have your dance card full.”

“You sound like our next door neighbor,” Kurt says, blushing himself. “Mrs. DeGrasso. She says that all the time…except…about girls.”

Devon nods in a sympathetic way. “Assumptions are a difficult thing to live with,” he says. “Unfortunately, they’re all around, and as long as straights make up the majority, you’ll be straight until proven guilty.”

Kurt doesn’t have a response for that. He’s never heard it put that way before, but it’s extremely fitting.

“Is there someone special?” Devon asks. “Or are you focusing on your studies and letting the universe decide when to toss Mr. Right into your path?”

“I think…” Kurt starts, turning away from Blaine when he feels his hazel eyes wait with interest for his answer, “I’m going to focus on _me_ for now, and let love come in its own time. There’s so many things I want to do, and high school…it’s too early for me to want to meet someone yet. And believe me, there’s no one in Lima I’d want to be romantically involved with anyway.”

That isn’t entirely the truth, but he doesn’t want to go in to the intricacies of how he had had a flash-in-the-pan infatuation with the boy who is now dating his best friend and may someday become his stepbrother. It sounds too much like a soap opera to even be believable.

Kurt’s eyes dart to Blaine’s face, astonished to see that his answer to Devon’s question hasn’t deterred the look of admiration in Blaine’s expression any.

He’s also astonished to discover that, even though he was being honest about waiting to meet someone, he’s relieved.

Devon takes a deep breath, and it culls a heavy silence, one that calls Kurt and Blaine’s attention as if Devon had announced that he was about to make a speech.

“The first person I fell in love with…I was just a boy in high school, a little younger than the two of you. We went to the same school, had most of our classes together.” Devon pauses. He sighs, his eyes distant, looking far beyond Kurt and Blaine, beyond the room they’re in, into the past where this boy lives vibrantly in Devon’s memory. “His name was Michael. He was a brilliant boy, into science and math, and on his own, he studied topics that most kids our age wouldn’t touch unless forced – physics, calculus, chemistry. He was athletic, too. He played soccer, golf, tennis. He was the only freshman on the varsity baseball team. He was kind and sweet and shy…and beautiful. So, so beautiful.” Devon blinks his eyes but he doesn’t come back from his nostalgia, not yet, and Kurt holds his breath, not wanting to do anything to shatter the memory. “Back then, as you might have guessed, words like homosexual and gay weren’t used the way they are now. In fact, they were used more between my straight friends as insults than they were for any other reason. I’m not saying that’s still not the way, but…it was _more_ that way when I was younger, and more dangerous. I know my friends didn’t have a care about it. It didn’t mean the same to them as it did to me. But I did anything to make sure not a single one of my gang ever thought I was gay.” Blaine and Kurt, both with forks paused so they can listen, nod, with similar looks of understanding on their faces. “To be honest,” Devon says with a small smile, “I never much liked the word _gay_ or _queer_. I kind of always preferred the word _faggot_.”

“Grandpa!” Blaine exclaims, sounding mortified.

Kurt is, too, but he’s also too curious to let the subject drop.

“Why is that, Mr. Anderson?”

“Because it has power behind it,” Devon says, shaking a fist in the air for emphasis. “As bad as it is, when you heard someone throw that word around, you straightened up and you listened, because you knew something bad was going to go down. The point is, it attracted attention – serious attention. And that’s what we needed. We needed people to listen to us. We needed our parents, our teachers, our doctors, our pastors to know that this was important. Who we were was important, and ignoring us or beating us or sending us away wasn’t going to change who we were. If anything, it was killing us…slowly.”

There’s strength in Devon’s words, in his voice, but they make Kurt feel weak. Kurt has spent much time over the last few years watching the world change, being a part of that change, being proud of it and what it means for the future. But the way Devon felt decades ago is the same way Kurt has felt, days ago, in some ways.

How can so much change, and yet not much be all that different?

“So, what happened between you and that boy?” Kurt asks. “Did you tell him how you felt?”

Blaine looks stunned, maybe even a little upset. Kurt can tell that Blaine hasn’t heard a word of this story before. Kurt feels guilty that this revelation, which probably should have been shared between Devon and his grandson first, was prompted by Kurt’s presence.

“He was deeper in the closet than I was back then,” Devon says. “We talked a lot in private, mostly at his house. His father worked and his mother volunteered with the Rotary Club, so no one was ever around. My parents, well…” Devon looks past Blaine, right at Kurt. “You know,” he says quietly. Kurt nods. He does know. He read all about what Devon’s parents were like when Devon was a teenager, questioning himself and exploring his sexuality, discovering what it meant to be _gay_. But Blaine looks between the two of them, confused, like Kurt and his grandfather are speaking a secret language that Blaine thought for sure he would know, too. “We discussed our feelings, our fears, what we wanted for the future if we could have whatever we wanted. I think he was in love with me, too, but maybe just because I was the only other gay kid he knew. I wanted to kiss him… _God_ , I wanted to kiss him so badly, but he wasn’t ready for that.” Devon picks up his napkin from his lap and folds it, stalling for time, arranging his thoughts so they wouldn’t sound as bad out loud as they did in his head. “I pushed too hard,” he says, leaving his folded napkin a perfect rectangle by the side of his plate. “I tried to convince him to come out. I said we could do it together. Start some kind of a revolution. I was a bit naïve back then, and more than a bit high-strung. I thought that we could make a difference, that we could prompt some kind of uprising, do it on our own. He was scared, said he didn’t know what would happen to us if anybody knew. I told him to start out small – tell his parents first, see how that felt.” Devon stops, his mouth locked around his next sentence, a tremor traveling through his chin. “I don’t know what happened after I left Michael’s house that day,” Devon says, his voice almost a whisper. “I didn’t think he would actually say anything. I was sure he was going to wait. But he came to school the next day with the biggest shiner I’d ever seen, and a limp in his left leg, like someone had kicked out his knee. I tried to get him alone and ask him what happened, but…he wouldn’t even look at me.” Devon takes a deep breath, like it’s the first one he’s taken since he started to tell this story. “Three days later, he joined ROTC. Because of his grades and sports and everything, he got early entrance into the Army. I joined the Army, too, after high school. Not because of him, but because of…reasons…” Blaine looks at Kurt to see if Kurt has a clue what his grandfather’s talking about – a clue that _Blaine_ doesn’t seem to have - but Kurt’s expression is blank, full of sorrow more than recognition. “I thought I might run in to him at some point. I guess I underestimated exactly how large the Army actually was. I never saw him again.” Devon shrugs half-heartedly. “I did one of those D.O.J. people searches decades later, kind of like you did, Kurt, and I found out he died a few years after he enlisted. I don’t know how. To be honest, I really didn’t dig too far into it after that. There are so many reasons why a young gay man like him – insecure, questioning, angry - could have died back then, I didn’t want to know.”

Kurt and Blaine stare at Devon in awe as Devon returns to his meal. He takes one more bite before he crosses his fork and knife over his plate of unfinished food and pushes it away.

The dining room becomes uncomfortably silent. If someone dropped a pin, or a glass, or a plate, the noise would be swallowed up by the tension surrounding them – a tension born from this admission of painful guilt that Devon must have carried around, burdened with for years. If confessing it made him feel lighter, which Kurt sincerely hopes it did, it weighed down everything else. Even the air feels a little too heavy to breathe.

Not one to enjoy silence, _any_ silence, Blaine asks Kurt a question about photography classes at McKinley, and conversation takes off again. The trio sticks to shallow subjects after Devon’s revelation. Blaine tells Kurt about the things he wants to show him while he’s in Great Neck. Devon lays out his schedule, letting Kurt pick what he’d like to sit in on (Tai Chi, pottery class, hydrotherapy, yoga, etc.) since Kurt had expressed an interest in seeing how Devon lives his life now, years after his career in the limelight and the high-profile life that went along with it were over.

“You have free reign of the place, Kurt,” Devon says, pushing out his chair and standing with a slight but noticeable amount of difficulty. “Photograph whatever you want, go wherever you wish, swim in the pool, play the grand piano, raid the fridge - you’re our guest. Make yourself at home.”

“Thank you, Mr. Anderson,” Kurt says, standing from the table as well.

Devon looks at Kurt and scrunches his nose.

“Now, you’re going to have to call me Devon if you and I are going to stay close friends,” Devon says. “Otherwise, we’ll just be acquaintances, and I don’t want that.”

Kurt starts to shake his head, but Devon shoots Kurt a stern(ish) glare.

“Alright, _Devon_ ,” Kurt concedes.

Devon lightens up and gives him a wink, much the way Blaine did, the similarities between them spectacular despite the gap in years that separates them.

At least Blaine has the security of knowing that he will grow to be a good-looking older man.

“Good night, boys,” Devon says. “Sleep tight. I’ll see you both in the morning.” He walks toward the staircase, then stops for a moment. To Kurt, it looks like he’s catching his breath, but he turns to face the two boys. His eyes drift from Blaine’s face to Kurt’s. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”

“You’re welcome,” Kurt says.

Those words seem to release a note of finality in the air. It strikes Kurt like a dissonant chord, unresolvable in any way that Kurt sees. Blaine feels it, too, because he hurries over to his grandfather before he can start up the stairs.

“Good night, Grandpa,” Blaine says, giving his grandfather a hug. Devon shuts his eyes and squeezes Blaine back, whispering in his grandson’s ear, something Kurt doesn’t hear. Devon pats Blaine on the shoulder, then turns and walks away, up the stairs to his bedroom.

The boys watch him go, and like some unspoken rule, they wait until he reaches the top step and turns down the hall before they start talking again.

“Should we clean up?” Kurt asks, looking at three plates of half-eaten food, though it seems that Devon ate the least out of all of them.

“Lillian will take care of those,” Blaine says, picking up his napkin, then putting it down again in the same spot, as if debating whether to clear those away.

“Are you sure?” Kurt asks, hovering near his place setting to see if Blaine changes his mind.

“Yeah,” Blaine says. “She actually gets a little testy when we mess with the dishes. She’s kind of…particular.”

“Okay,” Kurt says, not quite convinced that leaving the dirty dishes on the table is the correct course of action. But, then again, this isn’t his house. Blaine knows the way things go here. Kurt doesn’t. “If you say so.”

“I do,” Blaine says. He makes a gesture toward the staircase, presenting Kurt with a gallant half-bow. “Shall I walk you to your room?”

Kurt looks Blaine over, posed in a way that could be utterly ridiculous if it wasn’t him, Blaine Anderson, a boy kindled from another time.

“Sure,” Kurt says, rolling his eyes fondly. “Why not?”

“After you,” Blaine says.

Kurt walks up the stairs ahead of Blaine. This time around, Blaine doesn’t make small talk, and Kurt kind of wonders why that is. It feels odd to have this boy walk him upstairs, in essence, to his bedroom, especially since there’s this bizarre instant _spark_ between them. It doesn’t have anything to do with attraction necessarily. It’s just _there_. Kurt feels it with Devon, too. It might have something to do with the journal; it might not. But Kurt doesn’t remember having this with anyone, not even his best friends. People have always had to earn his friendship. He has no problem being alone when they don’t. Back in Lima, Kurt keeps to a small band of close friends. Outside of those eight or so people that he’s suffered through endless bullying, dumpster tosses, and Slushie facials with, he doesn’t make friends too easily. It’s not that he keeps any walls up. He just has a habit of making himself _unavailable_. He doesn’t need an entourage for validation – just a few people who know what it’s like to be the bottom totem on the pole.

But Blaine Devon Anderson is definitely not a low totem on any pole, and has probably never seen the business end of a Slushie in his life. Yeah, they share a lot of the same interests, but other than that, he and Blaine don’t fit in the same size shoes.

So how is Blaine getting to Kurt so quickly?

Is Kurt projecting? Is he looking at Blaine and seeing Devon – all those words he read, all those feelings, his struggle that resonates with Kurt so deeply?

If so, these next few days may prove to be more complicated than Kurt thought. Maybe it would be best if he sheared his focus and blocked Blaine out. Kept him at a distance. Kurt has a goal he’s working toward, and he doesn’t need any distractions, nobody getting in his way, not this late in the game, when time is running short.

Yes, Kurt thinks. It’s probably best to cut ties now, and restrict his contact to Devon. If he explains that to Devon, Kurt’s sure he’ll understand. Maybe Devon could even talk to Blaine, tell him to give Kurt this one week alone with his grandfather.

Or Kurt could just grow a pair and tell Blaine himself. Now seems like the perfect time, while they’re alone and Kurt’s bags are still packed. He could move to a different room of the house tonight. It shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Kurt turns his head to get a look at the boy following him – hazel eyes darkening in the changing light from the dining room to the upper level, that smile that tells Kurt that he’s thinking more than he’s telling. Blaine looks up at Kurt and meets his gaze, his smile growing wider, more mysterious.

That debonair smile of Blaine’s might be just a tiny bit heart stopping.

 _Okay_ , Kurt thinks. _Well, that’s not happening._

And not because he can’t tell Blaine to give him space. He doesn’t want to keep Blaine at a distance. He wants to let him in, even if they only end up knowing one another for a week and never see each other again.

Kurt gets the feeling that Blaine is a boy worth knowing.

They slow their steps as they arrive at Kurt’s door, an awkward pause awaiting them as soon as they stop walking.

“I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” Blaine says.

“Yeah,” Kurt says. “I guess you will.”

Kurt waits to see if Blaine will say something more.

It seems Blaine is waiting for that, too. Or just some excuse, any excuse, to keep talking.

“It’s been kind of a long day,” Kurt adds, “and I should probably get to bed before I fall asleep standing.”

“Yeah,” Blaine nods. Again, he looks like he might not move, but Kurt reaches for the doorknob beside him and Blaine gets the hint. “Well, good night.”

Kurt opens the door to the bedroom he chose to stay in, the bedroom directly adjacent to Blaine’s, sharing the wall right behind the headboard to the bed, and walks inside. As he shuts the door, he sees Blaine standing in the hallway, waving at him, not ready to leave Kurt for the night.

Kurt doesn’t want to admit that he feels the same way. He can see himself staying up all night long talking to Blaine.

He can also see himself passing out inside the doorway and waking up with the grain from the hardwood floor imprinted on his face.

Kurt starts opening his luggage, picking out his outfit for tomorrow and hanging it in the empty closet, then pulling out a t-shirt and a pair of flannel pants to sleep in. A second later, Kurt hears Blaine rustling around in his room, opening his dresser drawers, moving a chair…singing. Kurt stops what he’s doing and listens. Blaine is half-singing/half-humming a tune that sounds familiar, but it’s muffled, and Kurt doesn’t recognize it. If he could hear it better, maybe he could harmonize. Or would that be creepy? Possibly, but Kurt’s not sure that he cares.

With Blaine’s voice weaving in through the connecting wall, Kurt climbs under the covers and pulls out his journal. He jots down as much of Devon’s story as he can remember, but as he reads back over what he’s written, he curses himself for not bringing a voice recorder. He’s not doing Devon’s story justice. He can’t bring the words to life the way Devon did. Maybe it’s years of acting under his belt, or the simple fact that he lived it. The story belongs to him. The life he gives it is his own.

Kurt will never have that until he starts writing his own story.

So maybe it’s weaker than he’d hoped, but this is only the first night, the first story. There will be more. And at least he’ll be photographing Devon. Those pictures, along with what he can remember of Devon’s story, will give others a glimpse of it. That might be more important than winning the scholarship (though winning the scholarship definitely isn’t going to hurt).

Kurt closes his journal when his writing ceases to be legible, and turns off the light beside the bed, the chain pull on the vintage lamp making an audible “click-clack”.

In the room next door, Blaine stops singing.

“Good night, Kurt.” Blaine’s voice comes through the wall right by Kurt’s ear, and Kurt smiles.

“Good night, Blaine,” Kurt says. “Sleep tight.” With the drive and dinner and Devon and Blaine swirling together in his head, Kurt has no idea how he’s going to go to sleep.

Until he shuts his eyes and he falls right out.

 

 

 


End file.
